Google’s got a huge share of the search market, but is it better than Microsoft and Yahoo at finding what its users want?  According to some new information from Compete, maybe not.

Google’s “Search Fulfillment” Questioned

Compete’s Jeremy Crane investigated the matter and found that, in terms of statistical “search fulfillment,” Google is lagging.  “Yahoo! pretty much takes the cake on this one with about 75% of searches performed on Yahoo! in August resulted in a referral,” he wrote.  “By comparison, searches on Google result in a referral about 65% of the time and searches on MSN/Live result in a referral about 59% of the time.”

In terms of an explanation, Crane then added, “Lower search fulfillment numbers mean that on a percentage basis fewer search queries on that engine resulted in the searcher clicking on a result link.  So from this perspective one might consider Yahoo! more effective at getting consumers the results they want.”

The data isn’t damning, however.  When I want to double-check the spelling of someone’s name, a Google results page usually shows me all I need to see.  Ditto for any number of quick, fact-related queries.  So in these cases, it’s actually a good thing that “search fulfillment,” as defined by Crane, isn’t taking place.

Not that Crane is off-base – towards the end of his post, he freely admitted, “In reality the devil is in the details and the story is much more complicated than that . . .”  But if Google was really this much worse than Yahoo at search fulfillment, its market share wouldn’t remain so high.  So carry on, Google supporters.